Rushdoony’s Influence on Pastors

November/December 2007 issue
Faith For All of Life "An Exposition of His Thought"

By Jim West

While we can sing the praises of Rushdoony’s worldview, we must also understand that the engine running his worldview is the doctrine of the Kingdom of God (which expression he always capitalized). Although Rushdoony wrote and preached about the church, he rarely if ever capitalized the word church, especially in his later writings. His motive seems three-fold: First, the Kingdom of God is broader than the church. The Kingdom means that Christ’s scepter rules over everything under the sun, including church, family, civil government, education, etc. Second, he is against any apotheosis of the church, which raises the church to the level of deity or infallibility (such as the “infallible” teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church or a pastor acting like a Protestant pope). Also, his writings and lectures particularly accentuate the family as a major player in God’s Kingdom.

Consequently, his teachings on the church sometimes seem abbreviated. In his systematic treatment of the church contained in his systematic theology book, he even admits as much (although not without much explanation), when he writes, “It should be apparent by now that our concern is less with the church as an institution and more with the church as the witness to and the evidence of the life and work of the triune God. The church must also be an institution, but when it is merely an institution, or even primarily an institution, it ceases to be the body of Christ.”
Read More >>